There was his contempt for political “enemies” and his relish at the idea of sacking bureaucrats wholesale. “I want there to be no holdovers left,” he says about the Treasury. “The whole goddam bunch go out. .. You’re out, you’re out, you’re finished, you’re done, done, finished. Knock the hell out of there.” To which chief of staff H. R. (Bob) Haldeman gushes, “You’ll end up with one hell of a government.”
Nixon loved plots and long-range violence. The Teamsters, he told Haldeman, had “thugs” who could break up antiwar demonstrations. “They, they’ve got guys who’ll go in and knock their heads off.” “Sure, murderers,” says Haldeman, ever complaisant. “Guys that really, you know, that’s what they really do.”
Lawbreaking was only a public-relations problem. Why hadn’t they looked into George McGovern’s income-tax files? Nixon wonders. The trouble, says counsel John Dean, was that there were too many Democrats working for IRS Commissioner Johnnie Walters, and “it would have to be an artful job to go down and get that file.” Nixon agrees that it would take art to avoid being accused of abusing the IRS, but “there are ways to do it. Goddam it, sneak in in the middle of the night … We’ve got to do it, even if we’ve got to kick Walters’s ass out first.. .”
There was his anti-Semitism: “Aren’t the Chicago Seven all Jews?” There was contempt for his own backers–“the finance contributors and all those assholes”–and his own appointees. “I don’t like the son of a bitch,” he says of his antitrust chief, Richard McLaren. He orders Henry Kissinger’s phone calls logged to find out if Kissinger was leaking to the press (he was). Nixon refers casually to William Rehnquist, whom he was to name to the Supreme Court: “. . . that group of clowns that we had around here, Renchler and that group? What was his name?”
And there was his constant fear of betrayal. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover “should get the hell out of there,” but couldn’t be fired, because “We may have on our hands here a man who will pull down the temple with him, including me.” Hoover’s one time aide William Sullivan knew about the illegal wiretaps Nixon had ordered. “Will he rat on us?” the president frets. Many people knew the Watergate secrets, and “really the problem is that one of these guys could crack … the one that could crack that it would really hurt would be [E. Howard] Hunt.” And “[Jeb Stuart] Magruder knows a hell of a lot … Let’s face it. Didn’t Magruder perjure himself?” John Dean did crack, but after listening to eight or nine hours of the White House tapes, Nixon tells Haldeman: “I listened to every damn thing, and Bob, this son of a bitch is bluffing.” Ah, yes, the tapes: “I always wondered about that taping equipment, but I’m damn glad we have it, aren’t you?”
There are still more than 3,900 hours of unreleased tapes, and there’s one nagging question: what was all that punctilio about the need to find a smoking gun?
